When a site visitor buys a product or service, this is called a ‘conversion’.

I often get questions in the mail or through the contact form that might be relevant to more than just one person. That’s why I have decided to start answering these questions on this blog. I’ve created a new Q&A category, I hope to be able to add more posts shortly.

A visitor of the site, Michael, sent me the following question:

Is Revive Adserver capable of conversion tracking at the banner level, and determine the eCPM of each individual banner?

My reply to Michael was:

Revive Adserver can track conversions (sign ups, leads, sales), and every conversion will be attributed to the last banner a visitor has clicked on before completing the transaction. It’s also possible to record post-view conversions.

Effectively, Revive Adserver will calculate the eCPM based on the CPA pricing of the campaign that the banner belongs to. So yes, Revive Adserver can do conversion tracking and measure the eCPM related to every single banner involved.

What makes this interesting is that you could have multiple banners of the same size in a campaign, for instance, and after a while you might discover that one of those banners results in more conversions and thus a better financial result than the rest. The fact that a banner gets more clicks than another banner doesn’t necessarily mean that the same banner produces more conversions. Instead of trying to predict in advance which banner will work best, it is often a good idea to let the numbers speak for themselves.

For those of you that don’t know the terms and abbreviations used here:

  • CPM means “cost per mille”, that’s the amount of money an advertiser pays for 1,000 ad impressions.
  • CPC means “cost per click”, that’s the amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay for a click.
  • CPA means “cost per action”, the amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay for a signup, a lead or a sale (also referred to as actions or conversions). The advertising industry uses the term ‘conversion’ to describe a situation where a visitor of a site changes from being just a visitor into being a paying customer.

You can calculate the revenue a banner or campaign produces by multiplying the number of impressions expressed in thousands and the CPM rate, or by multiplying the number of clicks and the CPC rate, or by multiplying the number of conversions and the CPA rate.

If you then take the resulting revenue amount and divide that by the number of impressions (in thousands), the result is the eCPM or effective CPM. This enables you to compare the relative returns of campaigns with various pricing models.